Presenters: Steven Rolston, David J. Hawthorne, and Robert D. Hudson
The Marquee Courses in Science and Technology is a signature program launched in 2007 at the University of Maryland (http://www.marqueecourses.umd.edu/) to address the need for an appreciation and understanding of how science, technology, engineering, and mathematics can provide solutions to present and future world challenges. The courses are taught by a select group of the leading science faculty at the University. They are designed for students not majoring in the sciences or engineering, although enrollment is not restricted, and fulfill a lower level distribution requirement. Students study the process of science and how it offers solutions to many of the problems facing today's world, with course topics such as the energy crisis, the pollinator crisis, and medical engineering. Our goal is to reach many students through large courses, but taught in an interactive project-based approach, rather than a traditional lecture format. We will discuss examples from some of the six courses implemented so far, some lessons-learned, and how to judge our progress in reaching our goals.

Presenter: Michael Starbird
This session will focus on "guided discovery," a technique that enables students to learn how to create new concepts and explore ideas within a class context. Guided discovery courses can provide a whole class with a quasi-research experience by asking students to tackle questions that are new to them, while not being new to the world. By carefully designing a sequence of challenge questions, students systematically confront a predictable range of research experiences. Students can develop attitudes of self-confidence and personal reliance. They can develop intellectual stamina and the sense that by taking deliberate steps they can personally solve unknown problems that arise in their academic and personal worlds. The challenge for the instructor is to design a sequence of questions such that the students have the experience of discovering and exploring ideas on their own. This technique is well developed in mathematics courses that teach students how to prove theorems independently, but the technique is generally applicable to most fields, including most liberal arts subjects, the fine arts and topics treated in professional schools. This session will involve discussion of how to construct appropriate sequences of challenge questions in the fields of interest to the participants.

Presenter: Christopher Thaiss
Initiatives in writing across the curriculum (WAC) and in writing in disciplines (WID) have for many years been helping colleges and universities provide focus for cross-disciplinary collaboration, a rich context for faculty development in teaching, and improvement in undergraduate education. In this interactive session, I will rely on my almost thirty years of experience as a WAC/WID program leader and researcher to present typical issues in building and sustaining these efforts on campuses, as well as classroom applications. I will use my work at two universities, George Mason and UC Davis, to illustrate these issues and practices. Also informing the presentation of issues and practices will be two extensive research projects in which I have been involved: (1) a five-year study of student and faculty writers across disciplines at George Mason University and (2) a new, multi-year survey-driven study attempting to “map” WAC/WID in the many shapes in which it occurs in higher education around the world. Most pertinent to this presentation will be the teaching and administrative practices recommended by the first study and the findings from the U.S./Canada portion of the mapping project. Issues in WAC/WID that almost all colleges and universities confront include faculty motivation and training, student readiness and development, and outcomes assessment. The session will touch on these and others. Successful practices that will be discussed include integration of writing into courses, helpful responses to student writing, uses of new technologies, and ways to ensure program continuity.

Presenter: Bob Bingham
This presentation intends to address a number of issues related to the integration of the arts into General Education primarily through documentation of a project-based class entitled, Concept Studio II/III: EcoArt. This course began through a university wide Greening of the Early Undergraduate Education Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. The objective of EcoArt course is to create a class with half art students and half students from other disciplines and have them engage in a dialogue about art and ecology through a series of experiential exercises, readings and related presentations. The primary focus of the semester is devoted to the formation of small collaborative groups to conceive, propose and implement a project within a given context: a public park, campus green space, or along a riverfront trail. With a focus on general art and ecology concepts, the overarching theme of the course addresses the ‘nature of change’ and especially how human intervention affects change in the natural environment by constantly increasing the built environment and how artists can be agents of change, as a catalyst to begin conversations about issues of sustainability on the planet. The general outcome is to artfully address ecological issues by communicating through the use of natural materials and recycled/reused materials with an emphasis on quiet gestures incorporated into the natural environment.

Presenter: Steven Lamy
How do you keep 250 students involved or even awake in an introductory lecture course? Some universities have decided that clickers and podcasts are the answer and others have decided to limit class sizes. However, there are more traditional options associated with active learning strategies. This session will introduce participants to teaching strategies that actively involve students in the learning process. These include the use of stories and narratives, case studies problem-based learning exercises and lab sessions that include analytical exercises that operationalize lectures and readings.

Presenter: Sanford Levinson
Law--especially constitutional law--is often taught as part of the undergraduate curriculum. Unfortunately, it is my experience that most undergraduate courses in effect attempt to "mimic" legal education in the specific sense of focusing on cases decided by the United States Supreme Court. Many undergraduate courses have their students write "briefs" focusing on cases currently before the Court. My own view, which will be instantiated in a course that I will be teaching to first-year undergraduates at the University of Texas in the spring of 2009, is that such attempts to mimic professional education is a fundamental mistake, for two quite different reasons. One is that undergraduate and professional schools have quite different missions. The second, which is equally important, is that I now believe that law schools do a terrible job with regard especially to teaching about the U.S. Constitution precisely because the "professional mission" of preparing students to be practicing lawyers so completely determines the purpose of the course. It is, therefore, especially important that undergraduate schools resist the temptation to adopt a "law-school" perspective.

Instead, I believe it is essential that undergraduate courses, especially if they are viewed as part of "general education" rather than part of a specific disciplinary major (such as political science) that involve the Constitution should try to prepare students to be knowledgeable citizens and participants within the American political system. This means, I now believe, focusing on what I have come to call the "hard-wired" Constitution that is in fact never litigated (precisely because the Constitution is all too clear about how, for example, votes are allocated in the Senate or how the President is to be elected). These "hard-wired" aspects in fact have far more to do with shaping our politics, for good and for ill, than do the almost infinitely more malleable clauses of the Constitution that are the focus of especially the Supreme Court. What this means, in effect, is that colleges should take far more seriously than they may do, their responsibility to teach what, in the secondary school context, is called "civics." But, and this is the central point, students should understand that what too often are viewed as boring facts in fact raise literally the most important issues about how we should be governing ourselves in the 21st century. Students should be encouraged, for example, to debate the merits of the presidential veto power with the same intensity as they might debate abortion or affirmative action, two topics that certainly come up in typical Supreme Court-oriented courses.

Presenters: Laura Kissel, Patricia Willer
Filmmaker Laura Kissel accompanied a faculty member and twenty students to China to make a documentary film about the learning experience that occurs during international study. In making the film, the goals were to capture the actual learning experience of the students as well as to intensify that experience by adding the focus and intentionality of the actual filming. This session will include extracts from the 30 minute film, Beyond the Classroom: China, as well as a discussion of the structure of the course and the methods used to enhance the active learning of the students. The challenges of filming and the impact of filming on the students are presented. Discussion will also consider the value of using film as a teaching tool for prospective study abroad students and for faculty engaged in leading study abroad programs.

Presenters: Patricia Beeson
This session will discuss how general education requirements can be used to expose students to different cultures, make them more aware of global issues, and increase their interest in further international study. The University of Pittsburgh’s Arts and Sciences program will be used as an example. In addition to demonstrating language proficiency, Pitt requires students to take a minimum of three semester courses (nine credits) in international studies, including at least one that focuses on a non-western culture, or spend a semester studying abroad. One third of the students continue to pursue these international interests through structured certificate programs in African Studies, Asian Studies, European Union Studies, Latin American Studies, Russian and East European Studies, West European Studies, and Global Studies. The session will discuss how general education requirements can be used to focus student interest in international studies, and how to structure certificate programs in international studies to provide structure to the general education courses.

Presenters: Paula Burger, Ralph Kuncl
Aiming for breadth in a liberal education requires going beyond the focused major in a discipline. In the last three decades, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches have been solutions. However, even newer interdisciplinary areas have matured into the equivalent of traditional departments, and multidisciplinary team teaching is often additive, not synergistic. Students and faculties are often paralyzed by either the rigidity or opaqueness of excessively complex distribution requirements. Accrediting agencies seem to like them. Students rightfully ask about these requirements, "To what end?" Approaches to achieving breadth range from curricula with virtually no requirements at all (for example, Brown University), which assume students will naturally seek and find a broad education if given a rich enough supply of choices, to complex matrices of integrated distribution requirements (for example, Duke University), which assume that faculty-directed curricula are the best at assuring a liberal education. In this workshop we explore forms of student-directed approaches to general education that have succeeded at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Rochester. Two models will be described; undergraduate students who experienced them will respond; and your discussion will look to other alternatives.

Presenter: Michael S. Gaines
This session will focus on increasing engagement and retention of underrepresented minorities in STEM fields. What influences minority students to pursue careers in science is far from clear. We have learned at the University of Miami that engagement through research experiences, building student capacity for scientific inquiry, continuity through sequential programmatic activities to sustain interest in science, and financial and psychosocial support, can all help. But there's no magic formula. What ignites one student may spark little or no response in a second. The presenter will give an overview of a group of reinforcing programs at the University of Miami aimed at increasing diversity in STEM fields. Participants then will discuss challenges and best practices in creating pathways to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in the STEM workforce.

Presenter: Alphonse Keasley
Academic leaders recognize that substantive study of issues relating to domestic diversity and inclusion is an essential first step in preparing students for national and global citizenship. However, incorporating such study in the undergraduate curriculum in a way that produces the desired outcomes has proven difficult. The difficulty arises in part because, as Gordon W. Allport points out, “knowledge, on its own, will not cause people to negate their prejudices and stereotypes about others.” This session will focus on two innovative courses that draw on four theories to address this difficulty: Allport’s theory of “contact hypothesis,” M. L. Pratt’s theory of “contact zones,” and P. Freire and bell hook’s theory of “engaged pedagogy.’ Findings on student learning in these courses will be used to highlight the usefulness of these theories in educating students about diversity and inclusion. The session’s goal is to consider the various ways in which inquiry-based teaching of issues surrounding diversity and inclusion can lead to greater student learning.

Presenter: Sharon Salinger
More and more students are beginning their undergraduate education in community colleges and then transferring to universities. Using the experience of the University of California, Irvine, as a starting point, this session will be devoted to what universities are and can do, first, to attract transfer students to our campuses, and then, to help them make the transition and succeed in their studies. What mechanisms are in place to attract transfer students to our campuses? What institutional supports exist to ease the transition and sustain them once they are enrolled? Do transfer students present different financial needs? Do they require social as well as academic support? How do transfer students fare in comparison to students who matriculate as freshmen? What more can we be doing?

Presenter: Paula McCLain
The inclusion of material on race and gender in a class is often difficult to achieve. Part of the problem is definitional as discussions of race should include issues of gender and discussions of gender should also include differences based on race. Moreover, these issues should be incorporated throughout the entire course content, and the incorporation should be seamless. Clearly, this is a difficult task to achieve. Thus, the approach usually ends up being segregating these issues in a separate section, with gender issues focusing on white women and discussions of race not differentiating along gender lines. This session will give an overview of ways to accomplish this in social science courses, but the techniques will be useful for other disciplines as well.

Presenter: Randall G. Styers
Undergraduate students regularly bring religious convictions into the classroom, but often those convictions remain unstated. When religious beliefs surface—either in overt discussions of religion or in other ethical or political contexts—deep differences can emerge, and those differences can sometimes lead to highly charged conflict. Students benefit enormously from learning more about the history and differences within their own religious traditions and also about other traditions, but these encounters can often lead to surprisingly emotional responses. The purpose of this session is to explore issues that arise when religious diversity and conflict emerge within the classroom. What strategies can we use to acknowledge and address religious diversity? Where are conflicts concerning religion likely to arise, and how can that conflict be used to promote more effective learning?

Presenter: Daniel Maier-Katkin
This session offers a case example of an initiative to develop and implement an undergraduate curriculum on International Human Rights. The initiative successfully connects a university’s development efforts with its interests in advancing interdisciplinarity, international study, and independent student scholarship in its undergraduate education. In 2001, with initial gifts of $6,000,000, Florida State University established the Center for the Advancement of Human Rights. The terms of the gifts required that the Center be explicitly interdisciplinary and that its efforts be directed at advancing human rights through scholarship, social action and programs of education at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The Center’s action projects have created opportunities for students and faculty members to work in non-governmental organizations and human rights projects in Africa, Latin America, and the United States. In addition, an initiative directed at active faculty scholars that began with a multidisciplinary faculty seminar and a summer stipend program has led to the development of more than twenty new courses on human rights in more than ten different academic departments, including religion, international affairs, criminology, modern languages, history and theater. The Center has also collaborated with the University Honors Program to establish a certificate program that allows the University’s top students to graduate with a human rights concentration associated with any major. Most recently, the Center has partnered with the University Honors Programs, the Division of International Programs, and the Human Rights Center to create a summer program focused on totalitarianism and the violation of human rights in the Nazi Era and its aftermath. This program involves six weeks of study “in the field” in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic and Poland.

Presenters: Kristia H. Finnigan, Carolyn Jones
The University of South Carolina is a research institution engaged in a re-examination of several facets of its undergraduate program, including general education and experiential and international learning. New models for internationalizing the undergraduate experience are being explored in an effort to go beyond an exclusively course-bound approach to experiential learning and leadership, and to create new opportunities for student-led initiatives in international settings. This session describes an interdisciplinary approach to international service learning and leadership that was developed jointly between the Moore School of Business and the College of Arts and Sciences at USC. A team composed of undergraduate majors from both units traveled to Cluj-Napoca, Romania in 2005 to conduct/teach a week long English language Global Issues Immersion Camp to over 100 Romanian students from seven high schools. In this session, we will share the lessons learned from the unique cross-cultural experience and discuss ideas about how to adapt the Immersion Camp model to other geographic locations and cultures.

Presenters: Kathy O’Byrne
The session will provide an overview of the UCLA Center for Community Learning and their work in creating campus-community partnerships linked to teaching and research. The undergraduate curricular arm of the Chancellor's "UCLA in LA" initiative, the Center for Community Learning has created a comprehensive Center for undergraduates, faculty who teach undergraduates and community partners. The Center supports academic credit-bearing internships, service learning courses, community based research and a variety of AmeriCorps programs. The Center is also home to the undergraduate minor in Civic Engagement, which offers students the opportunity to be civically engaged at the local, state or national level and to conduct research on contemporary policy issues. The session will outline some of the Center’s developmental milestones in creating new courses and programs that incorporate community learning, the infrastructure and resources necessary for this development, and provide information on their work with key campus and community stakeholders. The session will also provide a context for our work in Los Angeles, by acknowledging the philosophy and intent of the national civic engagement/service learning movement, as well as the recent focus on the leadership role of research universities.

Presenters: Daniel Hastings
Many internationally oriented universities are discussing how to lead in an era where there are global economies and collaborations. The research enterprise at US universities has long had strong international components. Increasingly, education is taking on more of a global flavor.

Given this more international flavor in education, many undergraduate colleges and universities in the US find themselves both wrestling with how to provide global experiences in their education and being approached by universities worldwide who want to partner in some educational fashion. The purpose of this session is to elucidate the need for a globally oriented education, outline a value statement for engagements that go beyond "academic tourism" and lay out some of the principles by which US universities can engage.

Presenter: Jill McKinstry, Trevor Griffey
This presentation will discuss the teaching model used by the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project (http://www.civilrights.washington.edu) that put undergraduate students at the center of a project to document histories of white supremacy and civil rights movement activism in the Pacific Northwest. It will provide an opportunity to discuss how web-based, community history projects can transform undergraduate education while facilitating new relationships between universities and the communities of which they are a part.

Presenter: Cheryl Beil, Barbara Yonai
George Washington and Syracuse Universities are in their final year of participation in a four-year longitudinal study of the Collegiate Learning Assessment funded by the Lumina Foundation. At each institution, one student cohort is followed for four years, with the students completing the CLA as first semester freshmen, rising juniors, and seniors. The presenters will describe the successes and challenges they faced participating in a study that requested a representative sampling of students for a voluntary, multi-hour exam of critical thinking, problem solving, analytic reasoning, and written skills. The presenters will discuss what they have learned about their students and how the CLA results have been used on their campuses. Their experiences will be described in the context of “value-added” assessment and accountability and the benefits and challenges of using the Collegiate Learning Assessment.

Presenter: Laura Damuth
The assessment of undergraduate research has moved beyond the anecdotal stage of review to one that involves purposeful and concentrated evaluation. This session will focus on the many steps available to any program that would like to have a better understanding of the impact undergraduate research is having on their campus, both on students and faculty. Now in its ninth year, the University of Nebraska -- Lincoln’s Undergraduate Research program (UCARE) has gone through a series of assessment phases that follows the natural life-cycle of any program. The first stage, clearly formative in nature, asked if the program was being implemented as originally intended. The second stage, involving focus groups with both faculty and students, centered on the perceived benefits to both groups. The third stage has entailed a yearly questionnaire sent to students, using a tool based both on readings about other undergraduate research programs and on information gleaned from the focus groups. This evaluation sought to learn more about the student’s perception of their field/discipline; the student's self-assessment of certain skills (time management, effective writing, effective speaking, critical thinking, and problem solving); interactions with their faculty sponsors; plans for research (presentations/publications); and general questions about how their research experience has had an impact on their undergraduate educational experiences. The most recent phase of assessment has yet to be implemented. UNL is in the processing of approving a new general education program based on student learning outcomes. Because there will be evaluation of student learning for both coursework and co-curricular experiences, the UCARE program will benefit from the addition of a new assessment perspective, now at the institutional level.

Presenters: Bobbi Owen, Lynn Williford
Accountability and accreditation requirements have motivated most institutions to develop systems for assessing student learning outcomes of general education coursework and more in-depth studies in the major. However, it is also important to examine the undergraduate experience as something more than just a sum of its parts. Helping students learn to “make connections”—between the knowledge gained from their formal coursework, out-of-class experiences (study abroad, research, fieldwork, internships, and service learning), and applications to problems in local, national, and global communities—is the ultimate goal of undergraduate education. This presentation focuses on how a large public research university has approached the challenges involved in assessing students' ability to make these critical connections and is using the results to add value to the undergraduate experience.

Presenter: Keith J. Stevenson, David VandenBout, Sarah L. Simmons
The Boyer Commission Report (1998) suggested that changing the reward structure for faculty would be necessary to increase faculty involvement in undergraduate research. Yet, nearly a decade later, few large research institutions have made concrete changes in the faculty tenure review and promotion process to include undergraduate research. The University of Texas at Austin has developed an innovative new program that addresses this issue from a new direction: by changing the undergraduate research model to reward faculty participation using traditional currency. Our new program, The Freshman Research Initiative (FRI) connects undergraduates with authentic, advanced research projects from their first semester on campus. “Research Streams” of 30 undergraduates are mentored by a Research Educator (usually a Ph.D.-level scientist) who is supported by graduate research assistants and undergraduate mentors. Each Research Stream then carries out a series of parallel but independent research projects over the course of two semesters. This model benefits faculty by incorporating undergraduates into existing reward structures: space, graduate student support, materials and supplies, publications, concrete connections with industry and leverage for additional external funding. Because of the innovative nature of the educational efforts associated with the FRI, The University of Texas at Austin has received funding from NSF and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. We intend that our new model will change the way research faculty think about undergraduate research entirely. Our program has already begun to demonstrate the value of undergraduates as true contributors to the research endeavor and the benefits to the faculty of adopting the elements of our model.

Presenter: David Hanson
Introductory science courses at research universities generally are taught in a large-class format. Questions that are trivial for a small-class format seem not to have good answers for the large-class situation. How can students be motivated? How can they be engaged to think and develop understanding? How can there be one-on-one faculty-student interaction? How can the instructor know if anyone is learning anything in real time? What is the role of assessment (formative), and when is the time for evaluation (summative)? Some ways these issues can be addressed will be described, and then the participants will identify their most important concerns and work together for their resolution.

Presenters: Arlene Diaz, Joan Middendorf, Dave Pace, Leah Shopkow
If we are not clear about the kind of thinking we want students to do in the Humanities, it will be very difficult to assess that learning. The History Learning Project interviewed seventeen professors in the History Department of Indiana University about the kinds of thinking that are so automatic in the discipline that they reside at a tacit level and analyzed the interviews to reveal seven main bottlenecks to learning History. With this information the team created assessments and surveyed 1500 students on their ability to perform basic historical tasks. This presentation will show videos of the "Decoding the Disciplines" interviewing process and demonstrate how the process leads to lessons and assessments. Participants will discuss how this process might be applied to their own classes, their departments, and their disciplines.

Presenters: Rebecca Pearlman, Michael Reese
Digital field assignments combine active-learning strategies with digital technologies to engage today’s learners in team-based assignments in which students apply classroom concepts as they research real-world problems. The concept originated from a complete redesign of the introductory biology course at Johns Hopkins University. Faculty in other disciplines have since implemented digital field assignments in their courses. Students embrace these assignments because they 1) use technology that is familiar to them, 2) work in teams with the help of advanced undergraduate mentors, and 3) tackle real-world problems. Faculty adopt digital field assignments because they 1) expose students to research and 2) provide an authentic learning experience in which students apply key concepts introduced in class. The presenters will describe the educational foundation for digital field assignments and how it aligns with the Boyer Report recommendations. They will describe several case studies from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities while sharing best practices for implementing digital field assignments at other institutions. The session will include a discussion of how technology can be used in innovative ways to support undergraduate research in the curriculum. The group will also discuss the challenges of sending students into the field – whether the university campus, local community, or elsewhere – to conduct course research assignments.

Presenters: Catharine Hoffman Beyer, Gerald Gillmore
From 1999-2003, researchers at the University of Washington tracked the learning experience of 304 students who entered in fall 1999 in the UW Study of Undergraduate Learning (UW SOUL). In this breakout session, UW researchers Catharine Hoffman Beyer and Gerald Gillmore will focus on findings from the longitudinal study and on how the institution is using the findings to guide assessment. Making use of both qualitative and quantitative methods, the UW SOUL found that students defined and sought learning in complex ways and that learning was profoundly mediated by the academic disciplines. Evidence from the UW SOUL raises questions about the validity of simple, standardized methods to assess the learning of college students, even the learning that occurs during the time when students are said to be getting a “general” education. Instead, results from the study argue that valid assessment must be conducted by academic departments if we are to be serious about accountability. An account of the UW SOUL and results from the study can be found in Inside the Undergraduate Experience, by C. H. Beyer, G. M. Gillmore, and A. T. Fisher (Jossey-Bass/Anker: 2007).

Presenter: Claudia Neuhauser
Dr. Neuhauser is leading the development of an innovative undergraduate major at the University of Minnesota Rochester, a Bachelor of Science in the Health Sciences. The program will be housed in the Center for Learning Innovation. This Center will promote a learner-centered, technology-enhanced, competency-based, and community-integrated learning environment in which ongoing assessment will guide and monitor student achievement. The curriculum of this degree program will integrate the life/health sciences, the physical and quantitative sciences, and the arts and humanities. The development team will take a research-based approach to learning and assessment in the development and implementation of this curriculum, specifically, they will emphasize learning with understanding that goes beyond memorization and asks students to develop a rich network of well-organized, usable and transferable knowledge. Technology-enhanced learning will allow students to guide their own learning and assessment will facilitate a student’s ability to tailor their learning to their learning style.

Presenter: Cecilia R. d’Oliveira
In 2001, MIT announced that it would make the teaching materials used in its on-campus courses freely available on the Internet, for use by students and educators worldwide. Fast forward to 2008 and there are now over 1800 MIT courses published on MIT OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu), virtually the entire undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Over the last few years, OpenCourseWare has become something of a “movement”, with over 200 other colleges and universities joining together in the OCW Consortium. These institutions now offer materials from over 6,000 courses, attracting millions of web visitors per month.
This vast array of free and open materials is having an impact on residential education. This session will explore the uses and impacts of OCW in the context of residential education from both the faculty and student perspectives. We will look at the impact on education at MIT, and we will report on MIT’s evaluation research showing what OCW has meant to educators and students at institutions around the world.

Presenter: Glenn Starkman
We live in a world driven by the advances of modern science. Yet, the cumulative nature of scientific learning drives us to teach the same introductory material to our students as would have been taught to their grandparents’ and great grandparents’ contemporaries. This is a compelling justification for student boredom and dissatisfaction, even when mitigated by outstanding pedagogy. While a deep, mathematically complete understanding of cutting edge research topics may be well beyond even the honors freshman class, much current research can be broadly understood using the basic introductory material. This session will consider strategies and methods for bring the excitement of modern science into our introductory courses.

Presenter: Joan Weibel-Orlando
Two powerful trends within recent entering classes of undergraduates and one equally powerful influence on those students’ career plans have been of concern to university academic program administrators for at least the last decade. Increasing numbers of undergraduates enter the university with a career in medicine already firmly established. Given the current level of competition for a coveted spot in a medical school entering student cohort, undergraduates have opted to concentrate their undergraduate academic efforts on excelling in the biological and physical science courses which most obviously qualify them for medical school.
University academic program developers, recognizing the trend toward a pragmatic narrowing of intellectual focus have developed a number of study programs meant to encourage undergraduate to acquire what most universities hope to provide their students – an education that has both breadth as well as depth. The papers presented in this session describe a number of ways by which universities and college academic planners have integrated the tasks of preparing students to develop careers in medicine as well as to use their college years to explore the fullness of the cultural and intellectual experience a university education offers in the 21st century.

Presenter: Sanjeev Chatterjee
Since 2003 several schools at the University of Miami have been working collaboratively in the creation of a global motion picture One Water about the global water crisis. The making of the picture has provided many opportunities for inquiry-based research in university classes, creation of other media products such as short films and websites and the launching of purposive social media networks. A K-12 curriculum associated with the film was completed in 2008.

The One Water project has allowed faculty and students to engage with a global topic in innovative ways and connect across disciplines. This session will present various aspects of the One Water project and engage the audience in a discussion about cross-campus and cross-discipline collaboration based on real world problems.

Presenter: Kenneth Harrington
This session will consider Economic Development and Undergraduate Education as environments and agents of change respectively. Economic Development will be defined in its broadest sense as the forward momentum of communities that allow them to deliver balanced economic, social, political, and environmental value. Undergraduate Education’s context will be seen, as the mechanism that prepares students to serve as valuable change agents in a world of diverse and accelerating innovation. Four items will be discussed:

1. How are undergraduates changing and what pedagogy might universities consider in preparing them as valuable change agents?
2. What type of university environments and community partnerships might allow relevant experiences for undergraduates to investigate, learn from, and act on their personal motivations?
3. What methods can be used to create, validate, and extend educational experiments that allow undergraduates to grapple with large global issues that can span many disciplines and schools?
4. A case study of student undergraduate experiences in Madagascar will be presented and discussed. The global issues students face in this course are rapidly disappearing forests, extreme poverty, and the threat of collapse in rural subsistence economies that have little support for public goods. The class is a multiyear project partnership involving the Missouri Botanical Garden, Washington University in St. Louis, the Malagasy government, numerous NGO’s, and US based social entrepreneurs.

Presenter: Yi Lu
A weak link in current science curricula exists between students’ interests and course materials, as the starting point of most course instruction is the course materials instead of students’ interests. To strengthen this weak link, we offered a four-year course using students’ interests as the starting point of instruction. The course mimics a scientific research group, where students develop research skills through community building and research activities such as literature club, special topics discussions and research assignments. Peer mentoring involving students from freshmen to seniors, an important element that is missing in most courses, is also implemented. Trips to visit laboratories and attend scientific meetings expose students to the excitement of scientific discoveries. Assessment through the Classroom Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) survey indicates significant gains for students in a number of areas valuable in scientific research in comparison with other students who did not take the course.

Presenter: Lillian Bridwell Bowles
The effects of digital media on every field within modern universities have demanded a reexamination of curricula for teaching basic writing skills. In many fields “communication skills” may be a preferred term because 21st Century communication depends heavily on visual materials, video, Web 2.0 technologies for collaboration, sound, and more. At Louisiana State University, the Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) initiative morphed into Communication across the Curriculum (CxC) in 2004. Students take two basic writing courses (first-year composition and English 2000, an introduction to academic and professional writing) and then three additional “communication-intensive” courses in their majors. CxC certifies these courses and provides extra-curricular back-up in four Communication Studios situated strategically in Engineering, Arts & Sciences, Basic Sciences, and Art & Design. Studio staff and mentors provide assistance with state-of-the-art software for presentations, written documents, posters, videos, digital design, and more. The primary emphasis in communication-intensive courses and in Studio support is often on writing, but all courses emphasize at least two modes of communication (written, oral, visual, or technological). Assessing skills in these four modes is a key component of LSU’s university-wide assessment plan for accreditation. Students who complete a rigorous set of requirements, build a digital portfolio, and earn a GPA of 3.0 or better receive the “LSU Distinguished Communicator” certification on their transcripts. This presentation will include examples and illustrations of the courses, student portfolios, and assessments of communication in the four modes.

Presenter: Jerome McGann
While all scholarly research is intimately tied to pedagogy, advances in research usually drive pedagogical innovation in modern research institutions. This fact is as true for humanists as it is for scientists. It is also the salient institutional fact to consider when thinking about how to advance online research and pedagogy in the humanities. We now have a wide variety of IT resources for storing, accessing, analyzing, representing, and disseminating knowledge and information that is central to the mission of humanities scholars and teachers, and new tools and applications continue to be developed. Nonetheless, the vast majority of humanities scholars do not use these available resources, nor are they involved in exploring how to develop them further for the specific and traditional goals of humanities research and education. What has moved scholars to take up these resources for their research? What has held them back? How might or should scholars involve their students – graduate or undergraduate -- in their work?

Presenter: Henry Biggs
Combined degree programs offer students accelerated access to undergraduate study and graduate programs at the same time, providing exceptional, highly motivated students early orientation to a career path that interests them. This session will address both the benefits and challenges of such programs, including curriculum development and coordination, recruitment, advising, faculty appointments, involvement in campus life, and more.

Presenters: Dawn Geronimo Terkla, Stephanie L. Topping
This session will describe the Tufts Summer Scholars Program and the findings from a comprehensive evaluation of the program. The program was created in 2003 as part of the effort to enhance the intellectual climate, build community, and add coherence to the undergraduate curriculum. This university-wide initiative offers Tufts undergraduates research apprenticeships with faculty/clinical mentors and provides students with an opportunity be on the front line of discovery and scholarship. Each year approximately 50 Tufts undergraduates do summer research with faculty from Tufts schools and affiliated hospitals.